


The Wilderness Listened

by deathwailart



Series: Dragon Knights [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Elves, F/F, High Fantasy, Knights - Freeform, Nymphs & Dryads, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 17:38:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6966697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of what they discovered in the dwarven empire, Tanis, Ilea, and Oran must ventured to Jormsen when to report to the human elders of the oldest human settlement seeking aid only to find they are just as unwilling to hear as the elves of Tishlen.  Realising that they might be on their own, the three then venture through the woods that border with the great nymph forest of Borea in search of the nomads of the south, where there are rumours that humans and elves work together.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the darkness from the dwarven empire is waking, and all is not well between the great elven nations as Tanis and Ilea find that they have to work hard to overcome the past in order to move forward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wilderness Listened

Hunched against the cold, Tanis swore under her breath as she made her way slowly up the mountain path, the icy blast of the wind cutting her to the bone. Oran followed her, Ilea bringing up the rear, their progress agonisingly slow. Her leg hurt again, protesting the strain she was constantly putting it under but there was no choice, they had to reach Jormsen as quickly as they could and she was the only one who knew the safest route to take. In their time away, brief though it had been, winter hadn't lifted from the mountains and the ground underfoot was blanketed by thick snow, some of it thick enough that they sank through it up to their thighs. Hard frost had frozen much of it solid but it only made it worse when their weight was too great, suddenly sending them plunging into what they had thought was reasonably safe ground. In other places it melted but frozen again, great slicks of ice for them to slide or shuffle across, none of them wanting to look down. It demanded her full attention, as did watching for anyone else on the paths or, perhaps more crucially, hungry predators yet she found herself turning Ilea's way, unable to help herself. The elf had been quiet since they'd left Tishlen, face pinched and hard, bloodless. She spoke little when reporting what she could see and hear that Tanis or Oran could not, said thanks in the right moments, did as she was asked but other than that she seemed utterly absent. Her eyes stared sightlessly for miles and the rare moments when she showed any sort of change in expression – a sliver of a smile at Oran's remarks, a sudden flash of pain or grief – it was gone, slipping beneath the surface. Ilea hadn't even asked them to slow down as they clambered up the mountain and Tanis knew she had not become accustomed to them, not when these were more treacherous than those they had used to journey to the dwarven empire. Oran had offered to lash them together as she had before but Tanis had declined with Ilea offering no opinion.  
  
"Talk to her!" Oran hissed urgently, as she did at least thrice a day, rustling her leaves and branches. The bees between her ribs buzzed, an angry echo.  
  
"What would I say?" Tanis snapped back, pausing to cup her hands by her mouth, her breath and a flicker of magic mingling to warm her. "I think I've spoken more since I met you two than I have in years."  
  
"You must know _something_ that might help."  
  
"I'd make it worse, we hardly knew how to talk prior to all this." Oran huffed, a shrew scrambling down from her head where it had been gobbling up tiny insects, Tanis watching the progress it made until she realised Oran expected her to say more. "Maybe her silence is better, my people won't be happy to see her."  
  
"You'll vouch for her," Oran said confidently; Tanis looked back at Ilea again who could easily hear their words, the silence stretching, a bird ready to take flight. "You'll vouch for her." The nymph was less confident but she still believed. Tanis couldn't fathom why.  
  
Easier to change the subject away from the elf if she could even if it would be easier if it was Tanis alone, or just Tanis and Oran though there would be no escaping it, no until Ilea left them. It wasn't a subject she'd had a chance to think about, but the future had always been a very immediate thing to Tanis when you knew roughly how life played out on the whole up in the mountains, where the fine details paled against a story that had been told time and time again. "You should prepare yourself, you'll be badgered the second they see you, it's been a long time since a nymph came to Jormsen at this time of year, the children can be...grabby." Her face twisted into a scowl, knowing she'd be beset by the little pests too, the first Dragon Knight in so long to go on such an errand. Even returning with an elf would do little to deter them.  
  
"I like children," Oran said simply, a smile on her face that had Tanis snorting and rolling her eyes. "How long since an elf last set foot in Jormsen?"  
  
"The last slave raids were a few years ago, they aren't as common as they were, I just hope..." She trailed off, stepping carefully around the exposed roots of a tree, not wanting to think about what might come from the things they'd learned in the dwarven empire and with Ilea's exile, unsure as to what would cause more alarm and upset. She glanced back at Ilea again, watching her follow them, almost shuffling. Their eyes met, Ilea's widening for a moment before she looked away and down at her feet. Tanis sighed and rubbed her leg, ignoring the angry buzzing from Oran as she extended a hand to send a small blast of fire at the plant ahead melting a far deeper drift of snow that had fallen from an overhang.  
  
The silence weighed on her, all huffing breath and the muffled crunch of snow under their feet so she changed the subject, desperate to talk about anything else. "You kept those bees alive didn't you?"  
  
"I kept them safe you mean," Oran corrected.  
  
"Kept them safe then," Tanis agreed, waving the words away, eager to get to the how of it rather than the vagaries of language, "but how? And why, you looked like you were dying there as much as I'm any judge of such things when they come to nymphs."  
  
"We keep the bees safe through the winter. Each nymph is different but the bees I house have been part of me since," Oran paused, features twisting into a frown with a soft creaking groan not unlike a gust of wind through young green branches, "since as far back as I can remember. A young queen chooses you, she makes a home."  
  
"That's normal?" _That's all_ , felt closer to the truth, after what she had shared, a hand straying unbidden to her chest, a backward glance spared to Ilea. It seemed unfair that something that seemed so much more magical than her own magic be so much less bloody and painless, but she clenched her teeth, listening, accustomed to unfairness but still surprised that it stung.   
  
"Sometimes it's other things but the copse I come from are known for our bond with bees. Some places nest birds, provide flowers for butterflies, so many things but we have our bees."  
  
"It doesn't change the fact that you almost died to save them, it seems a very one-sided thing."  
  
Oran's gnarled branch of a hand reach out and patted Tanis on the cheek. "I don't know if anyone could understand but it isn't one-sided. I protect them but if I was attacked, they would help – I asked them not to in that awful place. I can help them to make a poisoned honey though, the sort that we used to hang when the elves came, you remember me telling you that?" Tanis nodded, watching as Oran carefully stroked over the side of her ribs where the bees were nestled, the hive soft and pale, like a little heart. Perhaps she should have understood better, given the heart that beat beneath her ribs but it was too raw still and how close she had come to sharing the fate of those who came before her terrified her.   
  
"Is it true that in the south, the places where it's so hot and dry that they have deserts, that there are water nymphs that live within wood nymphs?"  
  
"Where did you hear that?" Oran asked, Tanis unable to tell if she was curious or amused.  
  
"I read it in a book years ago," Tanis replied hesitantly, wondering if she should be embarrassed. Jormsen had archives of so many things, but in truth, it had been a nomad who had seen it with her own eyes. The nomad had had no reason to lie to her, surely.  
  
"We wouldn't put it like that but I don't know how to explain it better really. They bond, they're both inside, they keep one another alive but it isn't like the wood nymph is a house. We all live within something and someone else." Then the nymph laughed as she caught the sour look Tanis wore. "I thought I'd see a more cheerful you, returning home!"  
  
How did she explain that she no longer felt the same person who had climbed down this mountain alone? That there was a sorrow in her heart (only it wasn't hers, it had never been hers) that she barely understood. When no one living knew a dragon's ability to feel. She didn't know what to do with sorrow. Anger she knew, hot, bitter and salty, hard to swallow. She'd lived with anger in her belly all her life, pushing herself with it, ignoring the times her body protested, determined to prove someone wrong. What was she meant to do with tears? They only made her angry in a useless way, unable to settle to a task, snapping at everyone, and, after she'd received the dragon heart, too hot to even touch. Tears were being seventeen, backed into a corner at the unfairness of it all, trying to swallow it down when she couldn't breathe. Tears were the days of lying in bed feeling as though she were being held hostage, her fate even less her own than it had ever been, when only one person had offered tea and sympathy. Though the days of tears had been better than the empty endless days of just lying there listlessly, feeling everything and nothing, staring blankly at the wall or the ceiling until someone made her eat or bathe. She pushed the thoughts away before she could compare them to how Ilea was now. She hadn't seen the elf cry, neither had Oran, and she slept lighter than she ever had before. Was it wrong to give Ilea the silence she'd craved when she'd been that way? She tried to think of what Ragna would do but Ragna was a healer, soft hands and warm heart, possessing a sort of knowledge of these things Tanis never would.  
  
She called a halt when her leg began to cramp, stretching as carefully as she could. They seemed so close and yet their progress was so slow that she wondered how the nomads did this so often, weighed down with carts and wagons too, compared to the simple packs the three of them shared. She would welcome them on the road if she could pull Ilea's hood up in time because there was fairly little that would mark her as an elf if she could be hidden correctly. Her frame was far too slender though, she thought when she looked again with a critical eye, looking away when Ilea caught her staring, not even a starving human looked the way an elf did and Tanis had seen them, people with bones jutting from dry papery skin who still would seem heavier than the elf's body. All her features seemed too narrow to be human too although Tanis only knew northern faces or nomad faces, and the only differences there seemed to be the wear and tear of travel, the nomads with far more lines about their eyes, their faces darker from the hours out in the sun and all weathers. It would be her voice that would pose the most risk or rather that she spoke the elven tongue without accent and only guessed at human speech from the tone but seeing how few words she had spoken to Tanis or to Oran that would hardly be an issue because she couldn't imagine her saying much more to a stranger. They could pass her off as mute if they had to. Stupid thoughts really but they were better than thinking about how much it hurt to dig her fingers into the pucker of scar tissue on her thigh, trying to ease the tension with an audience of concerned eyes. Ilea would understand the injury better than Oran who still held a fascination for bodies made of flesh, of the aches they suffered, how they tired under such different circumstances to her. Nymphs could hack off limbs if they needed to and would grow them again in time, and Tanis was unsure if she envied them that or if the notion of a limb growing again horrified her.  
  
"We can grow galls-" Oran started and Tanis cut her off quickly, forcing weight onto the leg as she took a mouthful of water that almost choked her before leading them off again. She didn't want to think about the galls or what might be happening under her skin. Infections could hide in the body for years, she knew that, and some poisons were so terribly slow, and she was a human, taught healing as a necessity when she'd learned her letters unlike either of her companions. She'd been too ill to heal it, and the worst of it had crusted over once she had the ability to clean it, turned to a scab that was well on the way to becoming a scar she could tell a story of were she the type. Were she a nomad. Were she a knight of old. For once she couldn't think of them, knuckling away the tears that burned her eyes, all those shattered bones, everything in the dark that they'd found, what they'd had to abandon. Those lost to her people to be forgotten entirely, alone in their misery. If they'd had time then perhaps she could have opened it up and made it less of a mess but they hadn't, she'd wanted to put as much distance as she could between that awful place, and the song that called to her and set fire to her skin, to the way Ilea had looked at her and wept as though she'd cared. Let the healers worry about it and scold her once she got back, typical bull-headed Tanis, too brash and too stubborn, too impulsive, charging in with so little regard for the consequences. Still, as the leg twinged and she rubbed at it, she found herself hoping that it wasn't going to have her festering something under the skin that would wiggle through her, chewing away.  
  
"Tanis?" Ilea at last spoke, finally catching up with them as her hand hovered, reaching out as if to touch Tanis before thinking better of it, but when she wavered, exhausted perhaps, or overwrought, she caught her anyway, feeling her heartbeat race beneath her fingertips. The elven princess - if she could still be called one given the manner in which she had left her home - stared, and Tanis stared back, the way Tanis had on hunts when one wrong step had snapped a branch to alert the deer she'd been stalking. She shook the thought from her head and let go.   
  
"We climb until the sun gets behind there," she instructed, pointing to part of the mountain range far in the distance. "We'll lose light to make it safe and I won't risk the flame to continue. We should find a place to camp where the nomads do. This time of year, with the weather, we should still be ahead of those coming from the south, and I doubt anyone is in a rush to leave Jormsen quite yet." She waited for an argument, for some sign of a highborn woman, an elven woman used to commanding humans such as Tanis, to emerge but none came. The commotion of nomads could hurt or hinder their cause, but so long as they ran into no one else on their journey there, then she would only worry about the things she could actually stand a chance of changing.  
  
She told herself she was disappointed, not worried, when she had them moving once again as soon as her leg settled into the rhythmic pulsing she'd become accustomed to, with even Oran falling silent as they approached what would be the last stretch of the journey. The path was mercifully wider, and Ilea's sense of wonder finally broke through her grief or pain once she realised the three of them could walk abreast without one having to scrape against the side of the mountain or another perilously close to plummeting over the edge with one false step. The higher anyone got in the mountains, the safer the paths, and the patrols would still be obliged to come down here Tanis knew from her own routes although it would depend on who actually went, if it was more than one person, how old they were, if the nomads came too since they had far more interest in keeping the paths maintained than most of the residents of Jormsen themselves did. Watching the elf cautiously run her hand over the barrier that had been built of ice and stone, shaped by magic rather than human hand, she wondered at how much she herself took for granted when her home had been her entire world until not so very long ago. To think that going partway down this mountain, into the forests to where they began to border with the beginnings of Oran's home Borea, and tentative forays up into the ranges of the Fangs to the high north that only dragons had truly traversed centuries ago, mere weeks and months ago that had made her seem almost worldly for a native. Nothing compared to a nomad but she still went beyond the borders. She went places alone.   
  
"How did you make these?" Ilea asked finally, still running her fingers over the ice even though her nails had turned pearlescent blue. Magic had made them. Magic harmed dwarves worse than elves but it still hurt the elves too, and up so high in the mountains, in the state she was in, Tanis moved take her hands, roughly chafing the warmth back into them. The fire dragon heart always left her running hot, turned her into a furnace at the best of times when she didn't control it the way she was meant to, but she kept her focus now lest Ilea's hands become damaged. It wouldn't do to return a damaged princess one day, she told herself, or to risk the wrath of the elves who would still find a way to be slighted over frostbitten fingertips.  
  
"Magic. Any loose stone can be pulled, bound with ice. Melt it if you need to and freeze it again. Sometimes you melt the stone too so it keeps the shape better, simple enough that anyone coming can rework it but it can move with the mountain if it needs to," she explained. "The nomads come with wagons and carts."  
  
"Is the path wide enough?"  
  
"Lower down?" At Ilea's nod, Tanis continued, still rubbing at her hands until she was satisfied they were pink again, the elf's cheeks showing more colour than they had since her angry words to her parents too. "They will be; the first journey up won't happen until after the first journey down, but if it does, and it is has, then yes, our wagons are never nearly so burdened as yours. We are not a rich people, even in the south." The remark had not precisely been meant to sting but it hadn't missed the mark, Ilea wincing followed shortly by Tanis when Oran sent a slender branch, green as summer grass to whip at the back of her neck where she was unarmoured, the welt livid and alive in seconds as she investigated it with her fingers.   
  
Everyone chose silence after that until finally the sun dipped low over the mountains, the peaks glittering and cast in burning pink and orange light. No matter how many sunsets she lived to see, it would always take Tanis' breath away, and it was a different sort of magic entirely, how the world came alive, how it seemed ripe as a fruit fit to burst, a flower with the petals finally unfurled. She called a halt in a clearing that had been well used with magic still lingering in the air and in the ground, enough to keep the snow and ice from forming so that anyone camping wouldn't freeze, the walls built in such a way as to pen them in if they'd had wagons and carts. She'd camped a night with a nomad group once, when she'd been a young knight and she'd been requested, because it had been their duty to escort their people so doing it at least once as ceremony when everything was still new enough not to feel tired had made her race down to join them, hesitant and awkward. They'd be sheltered from the wind like this, and from the way the path curved so high up, the only place anyone would be able to see their fire would be from above, and that would mean friendly eyes. Or for two of them. One. Oran would always be welcome as a nymph but Tanis was less and less sure how she would be received now when they had no way of knowing if the elves had gone ahead of them, if they'd sent word, if she'd be believed without proof or if her own elders would react as badly as Ilea's had. In her heart (only it wasn't her heart, not entirely and not really, it was older than her heart, it had beat in other bodies besides her own, it had beat alongside another before being offered up) she wanted to believe that her elders would hear the sincerity in her voice, her passion.  
  
Somewhere along her journey, doubt had entered her heart. They always said that it happened when you stood in the shadow of the mountain, that was known.   
  
Again, that was something that she could worry about when they were at least within sight of her home in truth, she'd do herself no favours losing her last night of sleep over it when she'd be the one doing the talking, the one most in need of a clear head. At least they could have a proper night of sleep together in the knowledge they'd rest easily, and that they could replenish their stores soon. Fresh soup, fresh stew, a real opportunity to go hunting for game without having to worry about straying too far from wherever they'd made camp, or about her leg bothering her. It was enough to coax a small smile to her face as she summoned her magic to get the fire going, Ilea immediately leaning as close to it as she dared, eyes closed to bask in the warmth of it. Tanis fixed Oran with a look as she dropped her pack, the nymph unfurled vines and branches, the better to pinion the elf with should she pitch forward suddenly.   
  
Pooling all their rations, together with honey Oran supplied, she left just enough for the morning, portioned out before she set about what had become a familiar ritual by now of mashing berries over dried meat, mixing them with honey by the fire to make them palatable after this long in their packs. It had been too long since she'd been able to hunt, injured and distracted, and when she'd seen a few animals on the mountain trails she'd left them alone, same with the bird eggs Oran had nodded to at points. The world was waking again. It wasn't fair to take what they didn't need.   
  
"Oran?" She called softly, a memory stirring as she investigated the fringes of the nomad camp, disturbing the dirt with the toe of her boot until it gave way. The nymph looked up, cocking her head. "Could you spare more honey?"  
  
"Do we not have enough for dinner?"  
  
"We do, but-" Bending carefully with a bitten-off gasp, Tanis used her fingers to find the edges of where the cache was hidden, slipping a small knife free to prise it open with a small grin of triumph. "A nice surprise for weary travellers in days to come?" Lifting an empty jar, she returned to the fire to settle next to the elf and the nymph, Ilea methodically turning the meat to cook it evenly, crumbling some of the remaining cubes of cheese over a few as she stared into the flames, not looking at either of them.  
  
"What is that?"  
  
"One of many, _many_ caches we have all through the mountain in the forests. Some are the nomads, some are ours, some…some are from so long ago we just know where they are, and others we've lost and uncover, but we keep them mapped and stocked. Think how dangerous it is to be trapped here, even with magic. Or even after a long and weary journey." The lid of the jar opened easily enough, a faint sniff revealing nothing of the contents that might have been there before.  
  
Oran snatched it away quickly, a delighted smile on her face. "Nymph honey, of course. We find your caches sometimes, on the borders, if they seem to be in ill repair we do what we can for them, and we always leave seeds."  
  
She still looked away as Oran filled it, marvelling over how warm it was in her hands as she returned it to the cache, closing it tight before she settled down next to Ilea to eat, ravenous as a starved wolf as she stretched out her leg at long last until her knee and hip both popped in sharp relief. Two heads turned equally sharply to stare at her but she ignored them, chewing on meat that was still tough, berries that had lost much of their sweetness from rattling around in their packs, cheese that tasted more like the smoke from the fire than anything else. Even the watered wine was going sour. Or perhaps the shadow the mountain cast was growing even longer the closer she got to it. She had always been so sure of the reception she would get until now, and she couldn't put it off. She would be home after the dawn broke through the clouds. Home with the worst news that had ever come since the war had ended.  
  
At least there would be no watches that night as they doused the flames at last, a curious silence falling over them once she and Ilea erected their tent, crawling in one after the other, Oran rooting herself into the mountain soil, with a smile and wave of her fingers. Tanis stripped down to her nightshirt, massaging oil into her leg until she couldn't stand to, kicking her heel uselessly against the ground until Ilea's bow callused fingers replaced hers, cool and soothing, her eyes boring into Tanis' for a moment until they remained on her leg.  
  
It was still far from helpful, and she could feel her cheeks burning in the dark.  
  
"Thank you," she murmured stiffly when the elf was done. No reply came from the bedroll beside hers, leaving her to stare at the elf's back until she pulled her blanket over herself, willing sleep to come before the red light of dawn lit up their tent, forcing them to make the final steps of their journey.


End file.
